David Bowie self-portraits fetch £6,500 at auction

Three self-portraits by David Bowie have sold for a total of £6,500 at an auction in Penzance, Cornwall.

The paintings date from the 1990s and are signed on the back. They were created as part of Bowie’s ‘D-Heads’, which he worked on prolifically during that decade. They sold to an unnamed collector from London at the sale, which took place last week.

Auctioneer David Lay, who sold the works, said: “It is always interesting to see the reaction to art that has a celebrity connection. David Bowie’s reputation as a cultural icon meant that we were expecting a good response.”

He added: “These three self-portraits came from the estate of well-known St Ives art dealer ‘Gillie’ Gilbert who I think would have enjoyed the attention that his collection created.”

Bowie himself has made no comment on the sale, but broke his silence earlier this year to deny that he had any involvement in a retrospective of his costumes at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Joking about a tabloid report claiming that he had fallen out with the museum’s curators, he wrote on his Facebook page: “The David Bowie Archive gave unprecedented access to the V&A and museum’s curators have made all curatorial and design choices. A close friend of mine tells me that I am neither ‘devastated’, ‘heartbroken’ nor ‘uncontrollably furious’ by this news item.”